Posts Tagged ‘technology’

Four years ago, I sat down and scrawled out some thoughts about what I would like to do to help the hobby game community. Over the last couple years, I’ve been able to support my family promoting games, and now it’s time to tackle some of the more ambitious ideas I had. (more…)

During the chaos that was 9/11 in NYC, mobile communications were a mess. The World Trade Center used to be an important hub the mobile architecture in lower Manhattan. Until mid-afternoon, it was virtually impossible to make contact with anyone, if you were relying on a cell phone. (more…)

You can spend a fortune on podcasting gear. If you’re an audiophile, part of the fun of podcasting is building different rigs for different uses. This can get expensive, though. More importantly, if you spend a lot of time on the road, it can be a logistical nightmare. Lugging around a ton of high-end A/V equipment can eat up valuable luggage space, especially if you want to do both audio and video recording. (more…)

Shel Holtz has been helping companies communicate for over thirty years. In 2005, he started For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report with his co-host Neville Hobson. Since then, they have produced over 450 shows discussing public relations and technology. I asked Shel to speak with me about podcasting and how it can help small publishers communicate with their customers. (more…)

When Google announced Wave, my impression was that it was a glorified messaging protocol. Based on their preview videos, it appeared that Wave would allow you to hook into various services, such as YouTube and Flickr, pulling in content to share in a conversation. The live updating and thread branching features looked interesting, but I left without being firmly impressed. (more…)

I’ve been tracking various key words on Twitter for some months. My hope is that I can determine when chatter about certain topics spikes, so that I can better help promote the products and services of the companies I work with.

For instance, I have a new podcast coming out this week. It’s a show about game design and game mastering, for people who enjoy roleplaying games. I could announce the show at any time, but why not make the announcement at a time when people are most likely talking about RPGs and podcasts already? Furthermore, why not release each episode during that ‘sweet spot’, if one exists?

Let’s see if one does.

Mentions of the terms “rpg” or “roleplaying game” by day of the week:

Fridays are a good day for RPGs – with 20% more chatter than on Thursday. RPG discussion appears to taper off steadily thereafter, with a nice little spike on Wednesdays.

This makes a lot of sense. Most roleplaying happens on the weekends, when people have more free time. If I wanted to give them something to talk about, I might want to do it just before the weekend, so it’s fresh in their minds before they get together with friends or chat about their gaming experiences online.

I looked at what time of day people are talking about RPGs as well. 9 AM and 6 PM PST see definite spikes in RPG conversation. Whatever the reason, those are the times I need to remember when deciding when to talk about my RPG-related news.

Mentions of the terms “podcast” by day of the week:

Unlike RPGs, there doesn’t appear to be a definitive spike in chatty about podcasts on any given day of the week. The weekend is slightly more active, but the percentage of chatty on a day-to-day basis stays pretty consistent.

Likewise, there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference in volume of chat during the day. Podcast discussions seem to be a little more popular in the morning than the evening, but not enough to make any real hard judgments.

The Verdict

I’ve decided that I’ll release my new show on Thursday afternoon. This will give people something to talk about on Friday, and it will be fresh in their minds as they go into the weekend. On Fridays, I’ll post on various forums and news sites about each episode, driving conversation about the show so I can take advantage of the Friday spike.

On the Wednesday before each episode releases, I’ll pre-promote the show on forums in a similar manner, riding the mid-week wave of RPG conversation to remind people that a new episode will be coming out the next day.

If you’re not familiar with augmented reality, there are a number of Googleable references. This video from Matt Dickman will give you a good idea of what I’m talking about.

OK, so now that you know what it is, let’s talk about what gaming companies can do with it.

Privateer Press could imprint unique icons on the bottom of each Warmachine mini. When held up in front of your webcame, two things could happen: your account could be updated to note that you own that figure and an animation of that figure, moving and posing and ‘doing things’ could appear on the screen. Privateer could tie that animation to a set of keystrokes, allowing you to dictate which action or pose your virtual figure takes.

Modern online advertising technology (Google, Facebook, etc) allows an advertiser to target a specific demographic based on any number of criteria. As someone who manages advertising for a number of websites, one of the most important targeting criteria is geography. Service providers and retailers want to communicate with local clientele, not some random Joe.

This is great for websites, but how long will it take for this same ability to translate into other platforms?

Assume for a moment that I publish an eZine. I decide to sell a PDF edition and offer advertising space to companies who want to reach my readers. If I’m a speculative fiction rag, I might sell a full page to TOR, but I’m not going to be able to land one for the local book shop. It’s not economically feasible for the local shop to purchase advertising that will only be relevant for a small subset of those it will appear in front of.

What if I could geo-target advertising, though? What if I could allocate a single page for ads relevant to the subscriber’s mailing address? I could then offer a low-cost advertisement to a number of local stores. Each store would only appear in those issues that were sent to subscribers living in their local market.

The same logic could be used for POD as well, with ads being determined by the demographics of the purchaser.

Geo-tracking would be very cool. Taken a step further, you could have an HBO advertisement that changes based on age or gender—Sally sees one for Desperate Housewives, while Sam sees one for Deadwood.

So tell me, is this technology available today? If so, point me at it.